“Warm” may not be the best word to describe the weather today but compared to Monday it is significantly warmer thanks to strong and building nor’westers across much of the country.
Christchurch is currently 13 degrees warmer than it was on Monday, sitting on 15 degrees this hour.
Timaru has been up to 17 today thanks to the warm winds.
In fact eastern areas of the South Island, which were most affected by the polar blast on Monday, are a few degrees warmer than most upper North Island main centres such as Hamilton and Auckland.
Hamilton this hour has 12 and Auckland is hovering around 14 degrees with thickening skies and incoming showers for tonight. Nor’westers are also building across Auckland city, becoming brisk in exposed places.
– Homepage image — File, Rainbow over Auckland / Keith Morgan
– WeatherWatch.co.nz
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What do you think? Is it “warm” where you are today?
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Kurichan on 27/07/2011 8:10am
Why is it that the media doesn’t know how to use the word ‘mild’? This is surely the right way to describe today’s weather. 15 can hardly be considered ‘warm’.
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WW Forecast Team on 27/07/2011 8:31am
Hi Kurichan
The story pretty much explains that! "Warm" isn’t a temperature…warm is subjective which means it can be applied to any temperature when compared to something colder.
For example, people in Yellowknife Canada, near the arctic circle, would probably consider a high of 0 degrees a "warm" day in winter. We would consider that "cold". People in Fiji would possibly consider that "Unimagingably cold".
In our Auckland forecasts we sometimes say "wintry"… but we possibly wouldn’t use that same word for an identical forecast on the same day in Christchurch because our Christchurch readers would consider a high of 10 to be fairly normal in winter. For Aucklanders it’s only a couple of degrees above their lowest ever high temperature on record.
Cheers,
– WW
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kurichan on 27/07/2011 10:28pm
Thanks for the reply, WW, but I beg to differ. Dictionary definitions give ‘warm’ as a ‘moderate degree of heat’ or ‘moderately high temperature’. There is therefore a lower bound to the word which is not open to any interpretation. A temperature of zero degrees, even if you’re from Hudson Bay, wouldn’t meet that criteria. I always thought warm was above around 20. Mild, however, is simply something that is not cold or severe. -20 could therefore be mild for our Saskatchewan friends, but certainly not warm. Perhaps I’m too much of a pedant, but I also don’t understand why the MetService has a ‘hottest’ temperature on its webpage. New Zealand hardly ever has ‘hot’ temperatures.
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pete chch on 27/07/2011 5:44am
certainly warmed up today in chch and melted a lot of snow..we had people in shirtsleeves sitting out in the garden at our cafe this morning drinking coffee in brilliant sunshine..surrounded by snow..very surreal
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Kevin on 27/07/2011 5:31am
Was pretty warm during afternoon.
Skies getting grey and raining..
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